Thought Based Linguistics

Argues for the central role of thoughts in the design of language.

A multidisciplinary collaboration exploring the role of cultural knowledge in everyday language and understanding.

Thinking Linguistically is a unique and clearly written introduction to the nature of linguistic analysis and issues in language acquisition. The book is for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, education, and psychology. Through twenty problem sets, based in languages not only from the Americas but from other continents as well, Thinking Linguistically: • Initiates students to the linguists’ way of observing and analyzing data by making the methods and the process of inquiry visible and accessible. • Engages students in analyzing the breadth and depth of two phenomena in a variety of languages—the expression of noun phrase plurality and the formation of questions. • Integrates analysis of these phenomena with results from first and second language acquisition research. • Emphasizes the interface between phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. • Exemplifies how linguistic analysis can be used for the teaching of critical thinking, problem solving, and the nature of scientific inquiry in general. • Is ideal for future language teachers for understanding acquisition and linguistic phenomena

An examination of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the relationship between grammar and thought.

Meaning in everyday thought and language is constructed at lightning speed. We are not conscious of the staggering complexity of the cognitive operations that drive our simplest behavior. This 1997 book examines a central component of meaning construction: the mappings that link mental spaces. A deep result of the research is that the same principles operate at the highest levels of scientific, artistic, and literary thought, and at the lower levels of elementary understanding and sentence meaning. Some key cognitive operations are analogical mappings, conceptual integration and blending, discourse management, induction and recursion. The analyses are based on a rich array of attested data in ordinary language, humor, action and design, science, and narratives. Phenomena that receive attention include counterfactuals; time, tense, and mood; opacity; metaphor; fictive motion; grammatical constructions; quantification over cognitive domains.

Traditionally, due to the availability of technology, psycholinguistic research has focused mainly on Western languages. However, this focus has recently shifted towards a more diverse range of languages, whose structures often throw into question many previous assumptions in syntactic theory and language processing. Based on a case study in field-based comparative psycholinguistics, this pioneering book is the first to explore the neurocognition of endangered 'object-before-subject' languages, such as Kaqchikel and Seediq. It draws on a range of methods - including linguistic fieldwork, theoretical linguistic analysis, corpus research, questionnaire surveys, behavioural experiments, eye tracking, event-related brain potentials, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and near-infrared spectroscopy – to consider preferred constituent orders in both language and thought, examining comprehension as well as production. In doing so, it highlights the importance of field-based cross-linguistic cognitive neuroscientific research in uncovering universal and language-particular aspects of the human language faculty, and the interaction between language and thought.

A distinguished cross-disciplinary reassessment of the work of Berlin and Kay on colour categories.